Wednesday, 28 April 2010

The birth of the end of the world Part 1

So...i am a big fan of the ideal of nature taking over once more, something i routinely try to inject into maps. I am a massive fan of the fallout series. But how is the ideal developed.

Something i have been playing with recently is social balance. When a government falls, there is no central control of what the people can and can't do. Historically, law has fallen to the church to enforce through belief systems. Our concept of morality has come from religious beliefs, and is now drilled into our society. As such, the social balance consists of Military, Technology and Belief.

The balance is maintained by factions pulling in different directions, not letting any one faction obtain more power than the other two. Once these factions are realised, then the basics of map planning can begin.

I have worked out that one of the factions i want is a technological faction that worship a Machine God (yes, very wh40k). The structure will be a temple like construction with heavy machinery within.

1 comment:

Balance of power is an interesting concept for a map. Balancing a map in terms if peoples and ideals is something I’ve never seen before. Looking Greece the city states each valued their autonomy from one another, often forming temporary alliances to prevent any one group from becoming too powerful. Of course, when you have leagues that don’t dissolve they eventually morph into more organized units: states or countries or empires are bound to form. Even out of the ashes of post Roman Europe great nations emerged that spread their influence cross the planet. (Aristotle believed the state was natural – people tend towards an organized state Aristotle politics book II chapter 2)

How will the 3 groups prevent each other from forming alliances among themselves or preventing one from becoming to powerful? And how will that be reflected in the map?

The amount of time that’s past after a disaster would have an effect on the outlooks of the survivors. For over a thousand years the Roman Empire was idealized as a golden age the likes of which would never be seen again in Europe. However, the kind of disaster that befalls a people, or an empire or a planet will have an effect on their outlooks. The survivors of a great viral epidemic would generally have a more positive out look than those left over from a nuclear war. The prospects for rebuilding society, the long term rebuilding of society would depend greatly on the type of disaster that befell the planet.

Certainly humanity has a chance of surviving another ice age. We’ve done it once already and survived where the Neanderthals could not. Plus there would be a large portion of the planet that would not be frozen and thus could support crop production which means society could be rebuilt. If the polar ice caps melted and the coasts receded it would certainly spell disaster for the planet, (of course the whole planet would not be submerged: there were no polar ice caps in the Cretaceous period). There, however, would still be the potential to rebuild.

If the world is irradiated after a nuclear war and the land could not support life, and the people were eating canned food until it runs out and then die… well it would certainly have an impact on people’s perspectives.

I really like the idea of looking at a post apocalyptic world in terms of the groups of people remaining. Are people working towards a common goal of survival or preserving the past or rebuilding society to its former grandeur (or beyond)? Or do the people have no hope of surviving the post-disaster world and they know it, so they burn and destroy and cause havoc for lack of having any other purpose?

I’m also not totally sold on the idea that morals instilled by religious beliefs are always the glue that holds a group together. While the church stepped into the void left by ‘fall’ of the Roman Empire, this has not always been the case when empires fall, (e.g., post Mycenaean Greece & Asia minor).